Going the distance...

Before I do a little report on our 9 miles (furthest we have gone!), I have to talk about our 4 miles we did the day before.

We woke up Saturday morning around 7.  We stretched (no breakfast...slept in) and headed off.  For the first time in our training, we decided to bump up our jogging interval.  We've tried decreasing our walking time from 3 to 2 minutes, but we've never done more than a minute of jogging interval.  So today we did a 1min.30 jogging and 3 min. walking.  My lungs felt great, my stride felt great...it was truly MY first GREAT RUN.  I haven't exactly figured out why it was great...or what made it feel so great.  We kept our pace and we knocked out our four miles in a little over an hour.  By the end of our run, I was dancing in the street singing "I feel good..na na na na na...Like I knew that I would!" (I'm know...I'm goofy)  :)  It just felt so wonderful to have a truly great run!!!  It gives me hope that things are only getting easier and funner!!  10 weeks ago, 4 miles would have sounded so daunting and miserable.  Now...it's just a little jog in the park before breakfast (granted, not the best idea to jog on an empty stomach)

9 Miles......Going the distance!!!

Since we bumped up the jogging interval the night before, I didn't want to completely back it off to a minute again, so we did 1:10/3.  And surprisingly, we noticed the extra 10 seconds of jogging...lol.  Just goes to show how used to that one minute of jogging we were.

Not feeling exactly enthusiastic for our 9 miles, I ate 3 Clif Bloks before we left hoping the extra fuel would make the beginning a little easier (seemed to have worked).  First couple of miles were a little hard, as always.  Our legs hurt as they warmed up.  We stretched several times through out the trip.  I wore my new shin/calf compression wrap....helped a TON.

For the first time, we took my husbands Iphone with us for some music.  It helped the time go by.  Conversation is usually our thing on long runs, but when we're jogging, the conversation usually comes to a halt; so a little tunes came in handy to keep us going when that minute and 10 seconds got painful and tiring.  The heat and wind really took a lot out of us.  We both went through almost twice the water that we usually do.  (Note to self:  Take gum for dry mouth!!!)  We both had more Bloks half way into our run.

The cool part about running to a familiar destination (a relatives home), they act as your watering stations!  3 miles away from our "finish line" T's parents were parked along side of the road with pop sickles and more water.  BLESS THEM!!!  We seriously needed the water and the cold pop sickles really help rejuvenate us.  After my third bottle of water, I seriously needed to make a pit stop.  Luckily it was T's old neighbor hood and she knew every house we passed!!!  So that made it apparent to me that the port-a-potty will get used on the day of our mini.  Good to know!

We finished up the last 3 miles like pros.  We jogged like we were just starting out...but I eventually had to back off the heavy stride due to immense shooting pain in my right leg.  We stuck it out and jogged 99% of intervals.  Something that I've noticed is that walking through an interval when you have tuckered out can really help.  Silly to think an extra minute or so can give you an extra boost.  T's parents had smoothies ready for us when we got to their house...AWESOME!!!  Our total time was 2:23.34  Freakin' awesome if you ask me!!  It didn't feel like we had been out there that long.  And I should probably mention that we stopped the timer when we stopped to stretch or had to shake some rocks out of the ol' shoes.  Over all, not that bad.